We all know the typical stereotype. Boys like to play with toy cars and trucks and girls like to play with dolls. It's a genetic thing.
And it's a notion that has long been disparaged by legions of psychologists saying it's not genetics, it's more a question of early socialization.
Now, a team of researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta has come up with a study that adds fuel to the nature-versus-nurture debate and sides with the traditional stereotypes.
And the researchers used monkeys to do it.
The team – Janice Hassett, Kim Wallen and Erin Seibert – decided to offer typical “male” and “female” toys to rhesus monkeys to see if toy preferences aligned with sex. The researchers offered 11 young male and 23 young females rhesus monkeys wheeled toys and plush toys. The wheeled toys, intended to be masculine, included wagons and vehicles. The more feminine plush toys included Winnie the Pooh and Raggedy-Ann dolls.
The researchers found that the females showed a slight preference for the plush toys whereas the males showed a very striking preference for the wheeled toys.
“It's exactly [the marked preference] that you see in published reports about humans,” Prof. Wallen said in a telephone interview yesterday.
“In humans, one of the explanations for that is because girls' toys are stigmatized for boys … but our monkey data look exactly like the human data. Why would monkeys show a similar preference?” he asked. “They're not subjected to the same socialization pressures as are humans. As far as we know, monkey mothers don't say to their sons, ‘Put that Pooh bear down!'”
However, he cautions about reading too much into all this.
“What we think may be operating – in kids as well as monkeys – is that one of the primary sex differences is in the activities that males and females find rewarding or pleasurable, and you pick the toys that facilitate the things you like to do,” he said.
“I think one of the biggest sex differences in little monkeys is that males like this kind of rough-and-tumble wrestling play and engage in this much more than little females do. And little females really like touching and holding infants and they do that much, much more than little males do.”
He says the study suggests “that we need to look at other factors than may not have been looked at in the past.”
The results support an earlier study at Texas A&M University, with green vervet monkeys, that also showed a distinct preference among male monkeys for “masculine” playthings.
The Atlanta study was first published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour, and was reported Monday on the website of the British magazine New Scientist.
With a report from Agence France-Presse
